The servers hum in a locked room, air cold to keep them alive. You are about to deploy a FedRAMP High Baseline self-hosted instance, and nothing can go wrong. This is federal data at the highest impact level—loss or compromise could cripple operations, cause financial damage, or endanger lives.
FedRAMP High Baseline compliance requires tight control over every layer: hardware, network, operating systems, application stack, and user access. Self-hosting means the responsibility belongs entirely to you. No vendor is carrying the risk for your security posture. Every control—system protection, media sanitization, configuration management—must be documented and auditable.
A FedRAMP High Baseline instance demands encryption with FIPS-approved algorithms for data at rest and in transit. Multi-factor authentication is not optional; it’s a hard requirement. Audit logging must capture every event with timestamps, actor identifiers, and immutable storage. Incident response procedures cannot be theoretical—they must be tested and proven.
Before deployment, you need to map every FedRAMP High control to your architecture. Establish a continuous monitoring framework that runs vulnerability scans, tracks patch levels, and monitors for unauthorized changes. Then verify access control systems enforce least privilege across all accounts, system processes, and APIs.